Lab Members

Justus Myers is a graduate student in the department of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied sociology and economics at Beloit College. He then worked for two years at a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Most recently, he spent a year working at the Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics (CSN) at George Mason University, under the direction of Kevin McCabe. Justus is interested in the cognitive mechanisms underlying the evolution of cooperation (and conflict), decision processes, causal reasoning, and cultural acquisition and transmission. To this end, he is interested in the nature and role of subjective effort in executive function processes. He is also interested in using methods from experimental psychology and economics.

Kris Smith received his B.S. in psychology from Arizona State University before joining the lab in 2013. He is interested in the evolved psychological mechanisms underlying social judgments and behavior. At ASU, he worked in psychology and anthropology labs studying prejudice, religion and prosociality, and parochial altruism. Currently he works primarily with Robert Kurzban on moral judgments, as well as working with Coren Apicella on social and economic preferences.

Fatima Aboul-Seoud has a B.A. in psychology from SUNY Albany. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in evolutionary psychology. Currently, she is working on projects concerning the moralization of sexual acts and the alliance hypothesis of human friendship, and is interested in attempting to use the study of emotion to better understand the modularity of the brain.

Molly Elson is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences, studying psychology with minors in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and Science, Technology, and Society. She is interested in the evolution of morality as well as female intrasexual conflict and cooperation.

Claire Ryder has an M.S. in clinical psychology from Radford University. She has spent the past six years doing mental health crisis work. She currently works for the managed care system for behavioral health in Philadelphia. With plans to begin work on her Ph.D. next fall studying evolutionary psychology, Claire is particularly interested in cooperation, friendship, conflict avoidance, and reciprocation. She would like to explore how emotions impact the ability/willingness to cooperate.

Journal Articles

We bring together this interdisciplinary body of research and review the main theories that have been proposed to explain human prosociality, with an emphasis on kinship, reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, punishment, and morality.
— Annual Review of Psychology

By focusing on disputants' actions, bystanders can dynamically change which individuals they support across different disputes, simultaneously solving the problems of coordination and exploitation.
— Psychological Bulletin

We review empirical evidence regarding the operation of these systems, discuss the causes of cultural and individual differences in their outputs, and sketch their computational architecture.
— Behavioral and Brain Sciences